This week we ask why some authoritarian governments are willing to let their citizens know when things go wrong.
Transparency is seen as a hallmark of democracy — yet some authoritarian states have real open government policies too. Why? New research suggests a striking answer: transparency may help non-democratic regimes maintain stability, by steering citizens towards official channels and away from protest. The research tests this idea in China and finds clear supporting evidence.
Joining host Alan Renwick is Dr Handi Li, Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the UCL Department of Political Science.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:04] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we are looking at transparency under authoritarian government. Why are some non-Democratic states keen to let their citizens know when things go wrong?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Transparency in government is widely recognised as a core element of democracy. If citizens can't see what their governments are up to, they can hardly hope to hold those in power to account and open government. Initiatives that seek to enhance transparency are therefore being pursued in many countries, seeking to deepen their democratic systems.
Yet open government isn't just a feature of democracies. Some authoritarian countries also have open government policies and in at least some of them, these policies are real and do give citizens access to information that may be useful in their lives, and that may at times be decidedly inconvenient for those in power.
But why would non-democratic governments do this? We tend to think of authoritarian regimes as inclined to hide any tricky information from their people. While recent research explores the idea that at least one reason may be that greater transparency actually enhances authoritarian government's ability to exercise control, specifically greater openness may make it more likely that citizens will pursue their grievances through official mechanisms and less likely to resort to protest.
The work tests out this idea through research in China, and it finds that the evidence backs it up. The author of that research is Dr. Handi Li, who is lecturer in comparative politics here in the UCL Department of Political Science. And I'm delighted that Handi joins me now. Handi, welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics.
It's wonderful to have you for the first time, I think, onto the podcast. And shall we set the scene a little bit first? When we're talking about open governmental transparency, what kinds of things do we have in mind?
[00:02:27] Handi Li: Yes. The short answer to the definition of government transparency is that it's some legislation that ensures public access to information related to the government.
So we see various names affiliated with this concept. In some countries it is called a Right to Information Act. Sometimes it's called Access to Information. In UK for example, it's called Freedom of Information Act. And in China it is called Open Government Information. But basically all of this kind of legislations are just a series of laws, regulations or policies that ensures public access information to government.
And under those kind of legislations you will see institutional setup and also maybe some policies and the implementation of those policies that make citizens able to access information. And we can see this transparency has two types. The first type is proactive transparency, which means that the government will distribute relevant information throughout the internet. Sometimes they also set up local physical means to distribute this information just to make sure that they're public to everyone.
And then there's also a type of transparency called reactive transparency, which means that citizens, under this legislation, they can require certain information from the government, maybe through email or some online form or other forms. Depending on different procedures, the government will just give the citizens this information by request.
And speaking of the content, I tend to classify transparency into four types. The first part is about the income and the spending transparency, which means the government will distribute information about the budget, about the revenues and the relevant expenses.
And there's another type, which I study a lot, which is about policy and the government's implementation of the policy and the behaviour of the government when they're doing this.
And there are also some other types, such as, transparency about officials behaviour like their spending, what they did.
And, uh, yeah, there's another type about the transparency of government statistics, the performance of the economy, of the government, and so on.
[00:04:49] Alan Renwick: That's a really clear summary. Thank you. And you mentioned China there, and China is
[00:04:53] Handi Li: mm-hmm.
[00:04:53] Alan Renwick: The main focus for the article that we're talking about here. So what kinds of open government provision exists specifically in China?
[00:05:02] Handi Li: Yeah. Speaking of this, I find it's very interesting in this China case because we all know that China is authoritarian country, right? And it started from relatively very weak in transparency institutions. So the idea of this open government information or transparency initiative came from about 20 years ago when the Chinese government that is, I would say that the early Hu–Wen regime.
So at that time, the Chinese government did a very large scale of consultation with the legal experts and with some even foreign organisations to get some ideas of the experience of transparency in Western developed democracies. Very interesting. So a lot of the lessons they can learn are from the US or the EU.
And particularly a very interesting point is that between 2005 and 2009, the Chinese government officially collaborated with EU to develop a project to help the Chinese government develop this transparency initiative. So it's not just on research base, but also they consulted the EU government and this collaboration, for example, they have collaborations from the Chinese official academy called the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that collaborated even with the UCL Constitution Unit.
[00:06:25] Alan Renwick: Uhhuh.
[00:06:26] Handi Li: Um, so they provide a report and a lot of consultations about the regulation in transparency regulation in China. So what we can see today in China's transparency initiative, including the legislation, which comes out in 2007, that is the first draft of it. And a lot of the organisational design, some of the way they train the personnel, they copy that exactly from the EU recommendation and their suggestions.
So today, if you can see on the Chinese government website, they have this guidance manuals for transparency, and they have a lot of disclosure schemes. And this kinds of annual transparency reports are all borrowed from the EU experience. So I would say that the Chinese government started with a relatively high standard compared to many other developing and authoritarian countries in the legislation and institutional design of transparency.
And in terms of the content of transparency. So for proactive transparency, the Chinese government will distribute information about various types of information. Actually, all four kinds of information I mentioned previously are distributed online. And they also have this thing called local bulletin boards. That's built for the transparency of government policy and the implementation. So those are designed for people in local communities who might not have access to the internet.
And in terms of reactive transparency, the Chinese citizens, by law, they can request information from the government and the government need to respond within certain days. If they don't, then the citizens can file the case to a political system and if that escalation doesn't work well, they can sue the government. So that's pretty standard as we learn in the developed countries.
[00:08:20] Alan Renwick: And can we say how transparent it is in practice? I mean, I guess there's the theory of the structures that you've just set up. Can we measure the practical level of transparency and compare it with other countries?
[00:08:31] Handi Li: Yes, that's a very good question. So from the start, it actually varies a lot by region in China because China is a big country. So, its development values and its political situation is quite different across different regions.
So I would say that the relatively developed provinces, and from one of my research, I find that the places with higher internet capacity developed better transparency, much better than those do not have good internet capacity. But over time, given that the central government are quite, I think they're quite strong, in terms of a quite strong strict in terms of imposing this regulation. Over time, I think the gap between the two types of places are closing up.
So right now, I think until, yeah, 2024-25, you know, most of the places in China developed a quite strict, you know, good implementation of transparency.
[00:09:29] Alan Renwick: Mm. And as I said in the introduction, in this article, you're exploring why a government might make information transparent in this kind of way.
And what do we already know about that question? About why governments pursue transparency? Because I guess, you know, one might intuitively think that well, governments want to maintain control any government, I mean, not just China and not just non-democratic governments, but any government might want to maintain control.
And, you know, giving out information is potentially a way of giving other people resources that they can use in order to take control. So why would a government do this?
[00:10:02] Handi Li: Yeah. I might want to make a small adjustment to the question a little bit first.
[00:10:06] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:10:06] Handi Li: Uh, so when we say why the government want transparency, I tend to think that maybe it is actually not the government who wants that.
Maybe we'll say, why would a country or a regime want that?
[00:10:18] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:18] Handi Li: So I think in both democracies and authoritarian regimes, we want transparency for the monitoring purposes, especially to monitor political elites. So definitely those elites who sometimes might represent the government, sometimes they don't.
So they don't like transparency, right? If we think about, you know, the cases in UK, those MPs are being discovered of misusing expenses, they definitely don't want it. But I think in these two different type of regimes, the monitoring procedure or the monitoring channels are a little bit different.
So, in democracies we have, you know, competitive elections, you know, public questions in the legislatures or free media. But I think in countries like China, um, the monitoring procedures more like the central government is trying to use open information or transparency to monitor the local agents.
So this is kind of, uh, the different part of it. And I think for both countries, transparency is important for maintaining better governance and to try to develop a better rule of law.
[00:11:22] Alan Renwick: Hmm. So any kind of government is going to want to maintain good quality government and deliver in terms of economic growth and public services and other things that people want, because that will enhance the government's legitimacy and make it more likely that they can continue in power in the long term.
[00:11:40] Handi Li: Yeah, exactly.
[00:11:40] Alan Renwick: Yeah. But in this paper, you're pursuing some other ideas as to what might be going on. So do you want to tell us a little bit about the ideas, the theoretical ideas that drive this research?
[00:11:49] Handi Li: Yes. I'm pursuing this idea because I find a lot of the discussions, so not just in the literature, but also public discussions about why authoritarian countries are doing something related to information.
It's just focusing on this monitoring mechanism, right. And a lot of them are talking about how the central government or the regime leader is trying to use information to monitor the agents. And they probably didn't want to mobilise citizens, to use the citizens' protest or their resistance to, you know, to kind of monitor or control political elites.
But I think this story is not very complete. One piece that is missing here is that we didn't talk that much about how citizens respond to the system in authoritarian countries. So my study just wants to focus on how citizens gonna respond to open government information in an authoritarian context.
And we, I want to see how the citizens are mobilised and whether this response actually cause more challenge to the government cause more mass threats or protests in those countries.
[00:13:04] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you're looking in particular at various different mechanisms by which people might seek redress when they have some kind of grievance with government.
[00:13:17] Handi Li: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:17] Alan Renwick: And the core idea, I guess, is that people might either pursue formal mechanisms of redress, they might go through existing institutional structures for achieving redress, or they might protest and go onto, out onto the streets or sign petitions and this kind of thing.
And so you're interested in understanding which kind of mechanism people pursue and whether provision of information may make a difference to that.
[00:13:44] Handi Li: Mm-hmm. Yes. And I think we are thinking a lot in general about, you know, how citizens use information to, you know, go against the regime.
Like people talk a lot about censorship in authoritarian countries, right? So the government doesn't want information to be open because they worry that this information can make citizens challenge the government. But I think, in many cases, we just ignore the situation that citizens can use this information in other ways, right?
So not just, you know, mobilising themselves and make collective actions against the government. Sometimes they can also use this information in the institutions. And because I think institutions in authoritarian countries is to citizens is less costly compared with, you know, collective action or protests because they don't face punishment, right?
They are doing everything within the institution. So that citizens also tend to use the information within those institutions to challenge the government. And if they find that this is a, you know, functioning way, right? Then citizens will tend to use this institutional channels compared with the traditionally, you know, protest channel or other more contentious channel which would also cause problem to the government, right?
So this is not necessarily bad for the central regime in China or other authoritarian contexts.
[00:15:10] Alan Renwick: And just what kind of information would we expect to have this sort of effect?
[00:15:14] Handi Li: Yes. So in this paper, I'm focusing on one type of the information I just mentioned, which is the policy and behaviour information.
So those kind of information will be about what the policy in certain area is and how the government will implement those policies. So for example, I want to talk about contexts in which we meet a lot of contentions in authoritarian countries, which is land taking. So for example, in China, when a land project is launched, the government is required to publish all related information such as whether this project is approved under the law and, you know, how they will compensate citizens, how they will arrange the resettlement and, you know, when this project will be launched and who will be influenced, all this kind of, uh, related things.
[00:16:10] Alan Renwick: So this, for example, would be if there's a building project
[00:16:13] Handi Li: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:13] Alan Renwick: That is being pursued. And so the owners of the land are being compensated. So essentially their land is being taken from them, but they're being compensated for that. So it's questions around just how that is happening.
[00:16:25] Handi Li: Right. So the situation is that before transparency, even though the government may have a policy about how a certain area should be compensated under a project, the citizens do not know that. And many local governments, they collude with the local developer or other, you know, relevant parties and they just take the money and they give citizens less they deserve. And in some cases I interviewed, citizens didn't even get any compensation from that. So those are, you know, a big source of unrest in China, especially in the rural area.
[00:17:03] Alan Renwick: So people know that they're not getting the money that they think they ought to be getting.
[00:17:10] Handi Li: Exactly.
[00:17:10] Alan Renwick: And therefore they think, well, the state is acting against me and therefore they protest against this action. And that causes difficulty for the state. And you're hypothesising that if instead the state gives them some extra information about the policy processes that exactly are in place then they're more likely to go through official channels rather than protest.
[00:17:31] Handi Li: Yes. That's because this kind of information provide a legal evidence for citizens so that when they see this kind of information, they are confident that with this kind of legal evidence, I will be able to win through a political institution or a legal institution such as the court, right?
So they're gonna use this piece of information in the court to challenge the local government. They're gonna try this first because they also know that protest is costly for them. If they don't have this kind of information, they have no other choices but, you know, to protest.
[00:18:07] Alan Renwick: And just in very concrete terms, what is the information that people are given here?
[00:18:10] Handi Li: For example, uh, how much people are gonna be compensated under the project.
[00:18:16] Alan Renwick: Uhhuh? So that's really interesting. So you are giving people information on how much they should expect to be compensated, essentially.
[00:18:23] Handi Li: Mm-hmm.
[00:18:23] Alan Renwick: And then you're suggesting that if people don't get that compensation, then because they've got this information, they're more likely to go through official channels?
I mean, I guess the alternative hypothesis of what we might have is that if people are being told very clearly, hey, you're not getting the amount of money that you ought to be getting, then they're more likely to be annoyed and they're more likely to feel aggrieved and they're more likely therefore to protest.
[00:18:48] Handi Li: Yes, yes. That is entirely possible but the usual case in China is that the citizens get way less than they deserve. So the policy is, by legal means, it need to be set according to the law, according to the policy, which is the marketplace.
[00:19:06] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:19:06] Handi Li: So for local people, they have a pretty good sense about the what the market compensation should be. So in that sense, I would say that this policy information doesn't provide them with new knowledge about what they should get, but rather the legal evidence that they could use in the institutions.
[00:19:25] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And they're kind of seeing state recognition that indeed this is the amount that they should get.
[00:19:30] Handi Li: Exactly.
[00:19:30] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Okay. No, that's really clear. Great. Thank you. So, this takes us a little bit into the methodology for the paper. 'cause, uh, what you're exploring in the paper is exactly kind of experimenting with the information that people have and seeing how they respond. Do you want to take us through the design of the kind of core of the research that you do here?
[00:19:48] Handi Li: Mm-hmm. So the experimental design is that I just randomly assign people with a message that I just mentioned, which is a piece of policy information from the government. So it is a truthful information from the government website about a project. And for all of the participants, I just put them into a hypothetical situation about land taking.
Just let them imagine, if this kind of dispute happened between you and your local government, and if you have this piece of information, what are you gonna do afterwards, right? And I had take two samples, one big internet sample, which is easier to collect, but I also want to complement it with a relatively smaller field sample.
So the way I did this is that I, with my research team just go to the field and to distribute printed service to people in two big factories in a southern area in China. The reason why we're doing this is because in the southern areas you can get people from all over China because you will see a lot of migrant workers from multiple different places.
So that compensates the fact that the internet sample usually covered the population from the most developed area. So that's a compensation. And also I think the field sample can provide more diversity in age. Because the situation we talk about is dispute with government, right?
So we believe that people with greater social experience, that's reflected by their age, are more able to answer these questions from their experience.
[00:21:30] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And so I guess you're confronting challenges in terms of just getting a representative sample through
[00:21:36] Handi Li: mm-hmm.
[00:21:37] Alan Renwick: Any of these different methods in terms of the online sample or the face-to-face sample, and therefore you're triangulating by having both kinds of sample in order to get a very clear picture.
And can we be confident that people will answer honestly? And I guess that they might be concerned about saying that they would go and protest. I mean, you know, this is an authoritarian country, so there may be some negative consequences to saying that you're going to stand up against the state.
[00:22:07] Handi Li: Yeah, that's right. Every year I got a bunch of emails from students working in, you know, Chinese politics on how I should find the right sample or right survey company to ask these kind of questions. The answer is unfortunately, that right now it would be very difficult to this. So I was fortunate that I conduct this survey several years ago around 2020 and 2021.
By that time, you can still find the survey online survey companies that can ask this kind of sensitive questions. And because all of this surveys are anonymous, you know, people don't need to worry about their answers being exposed to the government or anyone else. And I also, you know, check this issue by asking the question to see whether they have this potential social desirability bias.
And I didn't find any evidence that this, if there's any, uh, fear of government sanction that will affect my experimental results.
[00:23:06] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:06] Handi Li: So that's fine. And for the field sample people may worry that because as a face-to-face survey, people may be reluctant to answer these questions.
But it's very interesting that if you conduct a field work in China, and that's authorised by the local authority, not necessarily the government, but, what I mean as saying that the factory, those, you know, the leader of the factory are assumed by the people working there as their boss, right?
[00:23:33] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:33] Handi Li: So if they got authorised by their boss, they will consider everything as relatively safe.
[00:23:39] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. So you've got a bunch of survey respondents. All of them are being asked to imagine a situation in which they're having their land taken away from them for a development project, and they're being given some compensation, but they're not getting the kind of market rate for that land.
And then some of them are also being told that it's the government policy to give the market rate and given further details about that government process. Others are not getting that information. And then you're seeing, is there a difference between these two groups, the people who get the information and the people who don't get the information in terms of how would they seek redress for this injustice that is being proposed?
So would they protest, would they sign petitions, that kind of thing, or conversely, would they go through the established institutional mechanisms? Is that a fair summary?
[00:24:34] Handi Li: Yes, that's exactly, uh right. So we find that the government,
[00:24:38] Alan Renwick: Yes, so this is the crucial question, what, what do you find?
[00:24:40] Handi Li: Yes.
[00:24:41] Alan Renwick: What, what are the results of this?
[00:24:42] Handi Li: Yes. I find that the people who received the information are more likely to use legal and political institutions. So by saying legal institutions, I mean the court and the political institution is institutions in China in which you will file the case into a separate government department to handle this dispute with local government.
And we find that people are more likely to use both of these institutions to resolve their dispute with local government in this hypothetical situation. And we find out that more importantly, they are prioritising these institutions over protest or, you know, petitions, which is another, you know, contentious politics channel in China.
So that means that, you know, the information is directing people from the street to the institutions.
[00:25:35] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm. And are these big effects? Are they effects that make a substantial difference to the outcomes or that would do if they're replicated in real life?
[00:25:42] Handi Li: Uh, yes. That's a good question. I worried about this a lot after I finish the experiment because this apparently are, you know, in these experiments I put people in a hypothetical situation.
So I also take a look at the real world data. So I conducted a observational study, which means that I use real world data of protests and the real world data of transparency in China. And so I did, you know, cross province and the time regression and then find that the places in which there are better transparency have less risk of protest.
[00:26:22] Alan Renwick: By much?
[00:26:23] Handi Li: I don't remember exactly the number, but if I remember correctly, it is a large number depending on, you know, the average number of protests in China, which is not a big number.
[00:26:37] Alan Renwick: Listeners will just have to go and read the article in order to find out exactly the size of these effects. But yes, that fits with my memory as well.
So it's a really interesting finding. I mean, I wonder what we should make of it. I mean, I, so firstly, I suppose, how general is this finding? So what one might think, well, this is a very particular type of information about a very particular kind of setting, and maybe it doesn't generalise to other kinds of information.
So maybe it's not telling as much in broad terms about why governments might be willing to be open. But maybe that's wrong. Maybe actually this kind of mechanism does apply to many different sorts of information.
[00:27:17] Handi Li: Mm. So, for this paper I think my goal is to, you know, test a causal relationship uh, using the experiment, uh, between a certain type of information disclosed under China's transparency initiative and how citizens respond, which is kind of, I think a blank area when we discuss transparency in authoritarian countries.
So I have some other projects which hopefully will be done in this year about other, you know, in general, how the other types of information under this transparency initiative in China overall will have an impact on citizens' use of institutions and their contentious politics in China.
[00:28:00] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm. Sounds like we'll need to have you back on in order to discuss this further research and, uh, okay, well, final question from me in that case. Again, kind of thinking through what we should take away from this research, and so I can see that because of the mechanism that you talk about here, having greater openness is good for the government because grievances are going to be pursued through a more orderly process rather than through contentious politics mechanisms that are just inconvenient and costly in various different ways for the government.
I guess I'm wondering how we should think a bit about this from the citizens' perspective. You know, should they welcome the fact that this is sort of reinforcing the institutional mechanisms by which they can ensure that they're being treated fairly? Or should we be concerned that actually this may be a way by which governments can stifle contentious politics in situations where actually people do need to be pushing and do need to be fighting a bit in order to achieve what, or get what is rightly theirs?
I realise that's going beyond what's in the paper. But just in terms of thinking about what we should take away from the paper, do you have thoughts on that?
[00:29:17] Handi Li: Yes. I have many students actually asking me this question about how we should think about transparency in authoritarian countries.
What does it mean to people there? So for me, I still tend to hold optimistic view about this because I feel like we are talking about context in which there are weak institutions in which there are no information beforehand, and there are a lot of censorship there, right? So transparency at least provide people more information there and they provide people with more channels to challenge the governments, local governments, or sometimes even central governments.
We see this in some cases as well, and they can challenge political elites, which wasn't possible previously, right? And another thing that is easy to ignore by us is that by doing these challenges, even though not all of them are successful, it kind of nurtured citizens' awareness, their legal awareness or their sense of, you know, doing some political participation, which is very important for an authoritarian system to develop more mature civil society, right?
And it is also maybe some kind of civic education there. It's much better than, you know, there's no transparency there. So I will say that in a good sense, we can say that this kind of information transparency is also helpful in terms of educating the citizens and building even the institutions in authoritarian countries because if you compare this with, for example, China in the seventies, there are no courts, there are no legal systems, there's are no functioning political systems to resolve any disputes between citizens and the governments. Right now there's a huge practice and because citizens are able to use these institutions a lot, it help actually help these in institutions themselves to enforce, right?
If you want to introduce some institutions, but no one is using them, no one trusted them, then there's a big problem, right? So these are the good things. But of course there are, you know, a lot of caveats. And I will say there is huge limitation of transparency in authoritarian context. For example, one of my studies find that the local agents can actually manipulate the institutions.
They can manipulate the courts or other political institutions, um, so that citizens cannot win there. So that actually harms the functioning of institutions. And also the situation we talk about is in the context where the central government's benefits is allowing the, with, uh, you know, citizens, right?
So we are assuming that both the central government and the local citizens are interested in monitoring the local agents. So what if the central government want to collude with the local agents? What if they don't want to, you know, contribute to local governance or monitor those agents? You know, these are important caveats for us to think about.
[00:32:27] Alan Renwick: Wow. Wow. You've certainly got me thinking. This has been great. Thank you so much, Handi. What a fantastic piece of research and sounds like there's much more research that we need to discuss in future episodes of the podcast as well. So thank you.
[00:32:41] Handi Li: Thank you.
[00:32:42] Alan Renwick: We've been discussing the article, Transparency for Authoritarian Stability, Open Government Information and Contention with Institutions in China by Handi Li just published in the journal World Politics. And, as ever, we will put the details, including the link for that article in the show notes for this episode.
We'll be back next week when we'll be looking at the preferences of judges. To make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe.
You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too. I'm Alan Renwick This episode was produced by Matthieu Dinh. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.